by Erin Meyer
Quadrants A and D are pretty straightforward. In Quadrant A, emotions pour out—and this includes the emotions associated with disagreement, which can be expressed with little likelihood of relationships being harmed. Israel, France, Greece, Spain, and to a lesser degree Italy all follow this easy-to-read pattern. In Quadrant D, on the other hand, emotions are expressed more subtly—and disagreements are expressed more softly. Most Asian cultures fall into this quadrant; so, to a lesser degree, do a few European cultures, such as Sweden.
FIGURE 7.3.
Quadrants B and C are somewhat more complicated and require a little more explanation.
Quadrant B, which houses countries like Germany and the Netherlands, includes cultures that are generally not emotionally expressive, yet see debate and disagreement the way the French do—as a critical step on the path to truth.
When I began consulting for DaimlerChrysler in 2002, distrust between the two historic divisions of the corporation ran deep, with many Daimler executives proclaiming publicly that they “would never drive a Chrysler.” But when I welcomed a group of thirty German and American DaimlerChrysler executives into my classroom to discuss the differences between their two cultures, the tensions were not apparent. On the contrary, the group worked hard to create an atmosphere of cohesion and friendliness, with the Germans speaking impeccable English, several of the Americans practicing their German, and members of each group humbly cracking jokes at their own expense. The training session seemed to be going quite well—until I introduced the Evaluating scale late in the first morning.
When I explained that Americans are generally less direct with negative feedback than Germans, Dirk Firnhaber, one of the Germans, promptly interjected, “I totally disagree,” and went on to cite several personal experiences as counterexamples. A second German colleague chimed in with his own stories in support of Firnhaber, and when I demurred, the two Germans pushed back, defending their perspective vigorously.
During the lunch break, Ben Campbell, one of the American participants, who had been virtually silent all morning, came up to me. He was visibly frustrated. “I don’t get it,” he said. “The Germans signed up for this course. No one is forcing them to attend. And they pay a lot of money to learn from you. They know your expertise and experience. Why do they have to constantly disagree with you?”
While we were speaking, Dirk approached us, having clearly overheard Ben’s remarks. A bit uncomfortable, Ben turned to Dirk. “Is it cultural?” he wondered.
“I’ll think about it,” Dirk replied.
Sure enough, after lunch, Dirk was ready to share some thoughts about his readiness to challenge me during the morning session:
We have this word in German, Sachlichkeit, which is most closely translated in English as “objectivity.” With Sachlichkeit, we can separate someone’s opinions or idea from the person expressing that idea. A German debate is a demonstration of Sachlichkeit. When I say “I totally disagree,” I am debating Erin’s position, not disapproving of her. Since we were children, we Germans have learned to exercise Sachlichkeit. We believe a good debate brings more ideas and information than we could ever discover without disagreement. For us, an excellent way to determine the robustness of a proposal is to challenge it.
Ben laughed:
Yes! Sometimes I can imagine a German colleague walking into an empty room, closing the door, and starting a rational debate with himself. And it’s not just about business issues. I’ve seen Germans arguing about American politics, immigration, all the topics that we Americans have been trained not to touch with a ten-foot pole.
Dirk responded:
Of course we do not debate issues that are irrelevant or boring! If we are challenging you, it is because we are interested. You Americans take things so personally. If your German colleagues challenge a decision made by the leader of your country, a person you support and admire, there’s no need to get emotional or patriotic. Just calmly provide your perspective, in a rational manner, and you will likely find your workmate is simply interested.
This exchange vividly illustrates why the Germans (along with the Dutch and the Danish) belong on the confrontational side of the Disagreeing scale—despite the fact that German culture is less emotionally expressive than many others. If you think of your Germanic European business associates as stolid, silent types, you may be surprised when a matter of controversy arises. You are likely to find them eager to jump into the fray, since they regard disagreement not as a matter of personal emotion, but rather as a valuable intellectual exercise from which truth emerges.
By contrast, the cultures in Quadrant C, such as most Latin American cultures and some Middle Eastern cultures, are made up of people who speak with passion, yet are also sensitive and easily bruised. For people from these cultures, it is not easy to separate the opinion from the person. If you attack my idea, I feel you are attacking me also—which means I am likely to want to shy away from open disagreement lest it damage our relationship.
To make this more complicated, those from Latin American and (especially) Arabic cultures may appear as if they are fighting when they speak loudly and move their bodies expressively. But speaking with passion is not the same thing as disagreeing.
One spring, I led a seminar in Dubai for a multinational consulting firm. After completing my work, I decided to spend a couple of days enjoying the warm weather. An Emerati friend from work recommended a boutique hotel in another part of Dubai, and I made reservations for the weekend.
Friday at 5:00 p.m., I eagerly accepted a crosstown ride with one of my seminar participants, an energetic woman in her thirties named Isar Selim. We soon found ourselves stuck in crazy bottleneck traffic. Not until two hours later did we emerge onto a quieter street—at which point Selim began shouting out the window in Arabic to a traditionally dressed older man, who was crossing the road with a stack of colorful cloth in his arms. He responded in kind, and as their voices became louder and more intense, Selim got out of the car, shouting and gesticulating. I wondered what they were arguing about. Was he angry because Selim was dressed in Western clothing? Had her car run over some of his cloth? At one point, I thought the man looked ready to hit Selim with the bolt of cloth he was carrying.
Finally Selim got back in the car, waved her hand, and drove away. “What were you fighting about?” I asked timidly.
“Oh, we weren’t fighting,” she said matter-of-factly. “He was giving me directions to your hotel.”
As this story illustrates, to place a culture on the Disagreeing scale, don’t ask how emotionally people express themselves. Instead, focus on whether an open disagreement is likely to have a negative impact on a relationship. In Quadrant C cultures, emotional expression is common, but open disagreements are dangerous. In many Arabic cultures, people make extreme efforts not to offend others by expressing direct disagreement, as the ramifications for the long-term relationship could be serious.
One final complication in applying the Disagreeing scale is the position of the Chinese and Korean cultures on the avoid-confrontation side of the scale. If you have negotiated with a Chinese team and been forcefully challenged by them, or seen how confrontational Koreans may be with strangers, you may feel puzzled by this positioning.
The explanation lies in the fact that, in both Korea and China, behavior toward those with in-group status may be very different from behavior toward those with out-group status. Confucius provided very clear instructions about how to behave with people you have relationships with. But he provided almost no guidance on how to behave with strangers. In China in particular, where there is a large population and fierce competition, the relationship toward those with out-group status can be one of indifference and, in case of conflict, hostility. Thus, the very same Chinese person who shows polite and careful respect to his boss, colleagues, and clients may challenge every point made by a would-be supplier he doesn’t know at all.
The strategy for succeeding in these cultures thus goes back to
points made in the chapter on trusting. Take all the time necessary to build up a close trusting relationship. The time required may be considerable, and a foreigner may never achieve the same level of in-group status as a cultural insider, but a little time invested in building a personal connection can go a very long way toward establishing trust and reducing the level of confrontation you experience.
GETTING GLOBAL TEAMS TO DISAGREE AGREEABLY
If you are leading a multicultural team, figuring out how to get all the group members to express their ideas openly and comfortably may be a challenge. Here are some strategies that can help.
First, if you’re the boss, consider skipping the meeting. Depending on the cultures you are dealing with, both your seniority and age may impact others’ comfort in disagreeing with you openly. In many avoid-confrontation cultures, it may be possible to disagree openly with a peer, but disagreeing with a boss, superior, or elder is taboo.
When Danish multinational pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk purchased a new operation in Tokyo, Harald Madsen found himself collaborating with a group of Japanese marketing managers, all younger than him and junior to him in rank. Madsen scheduled a first trip to Tokyo in search of feedback from the local managers about which of his initiatives would work well locally and which they disagreed with. He hoped to get a good debate going with them, just as he would in Denmark. But Madsen’s dreams of a lively sparring match and a creative exchange of ideas quickly evaporated:
I began the first meeting by telling my Japanese colleagues that I wanted them to feel comfortable challenging my ideas so that we could be sure we had the best solution for their market. I then presented a few ideas and asked for input. Silence. I pushed the few with the best English-speaking skills, but it was impossible. I tried to get the ball rolling. Silence. I pushed them for input. A few nods of agreement and platitudes.
I could not figure out how to achieve a productive discussion if the group would not debate and share differing viewpoints. All the tools and techniques I had developed in Denmark were getting me nowhere.
Later in the same trip, over dinner one evening, Madsen asked Kazuyiki Yoshisaki—a Japanese vice president at his own level—for advice. “Here in Japan,” Yoshisaki explained, “even asking another’s point of view can feel confrontational in our culture. When you go around the table asking each guy on the team ‘What do you think about this? What do you think about that?’ that can really take them off guard. No one wants to be put on the spot in front of a bunch of people.”
Advance preparation would help Japanese managers feel more comfortable sharing their opinions openly. Yoshisaki suggested that Madsen let his team know a few days before the meeting what input he needed from them, so that they could check with one another and prepare their comments.
“But the real problem,” Yoshisaki commented, “is your white hair. In Japanese culture, you almost never see middle management disagreeing openly with higher management or younger people disagreeing with older people. It would be viewed as disrespectful. When you tell them your opinion and then ask what they think, they are eager to offer their support. Perhaps you think they will say, ‘Dear elder vice president, I entirely disagree with you,’ but they will not.”
Yoshisaki suggested that Madsen avoid giving his opinion first. He also suggested that Madsen ask the team to meet without him and report back their ideas. “As long as the boss is present,” Yoshisaki said, “the group will seek to find out what his opinion is and defer respectfully to him.” This is a technique that’s worth trying whenever you find yourself managing a team whose cultural background makes it difficult for them to speak freely in your presence.
A second strategy for eliciting opinions in an avoids-confrontation culture is to depersonalize disagreement by separating ideas from the people proposing them.
Consider for a moment the brainstorming system that is so popular in Anglo-Saxon cultures. Four or five people gather to record on a flip chart every crazy, brilliant, or downright stupid idea they can muster up. Once the paper is filled, it’s difficult to remember who came up with which idea, making it easy to challenge or change an idea without attacking the person who came up with it.
Harald Madsen took this concept a step further on his next trip to Japan:
After a presentation, instead of asking for input and expecting people to raise their hands—which I now knew from experience would not happen—I asked everybody to write as many opinions and reactions as they could on Post-it notes. During a break they put their Post-its anonymously on the main board and then, as a group, we arranged them into sets. Next, still working all together, we made lists of the positive and negative elements of each set of ideas, and finally prioritized them by voting on the most important. Each member had only three votes, so each of us really needed to make a clear choice.
Madsen found this approach to be very effective at producing the positive results of debate and disagreement without risking relationships.
A third strategy is to conduct meetings before the meeting. I discovered the need for this approach after attending a number of cross-cultural meetings that struck me as boring and pointless—but which participants from other cultures found interesting and valuable. Curious, I began surveying my seminar participants about what they expected from meetings. I asked:
In order for you to feel a meeting was a great success, which of the following should happen?
A.In a good meeting, a decision is made.
B.In a good meeting, various viewpoints are discussed and debated.
C.In a good meeting, a formal stamp is put on a decision that has been made before the meeting.
The large majority of Americans responding to this question chose option A. The French, however, largely chose option B. And most Chinese and Japanese selected option C. In many Asian cultures, the default purpose of a meeting is to approve a decision that has already been made in informal discussions. Therefore, the most appropriate time to express your disagreement is before the meeting to an individual rather than during the meeting in front of the group.
It’s relatively easy to make this cultural preference work for you. Before your next team meeting, try calling your Japanese colleague for a casual offline discussion. You are much more likely to hear a frank opinion, especially if you have already built a good relationship.
If you have a large percentage of East Asians on your global team, you may consider adopting the informal premeeting approach and encourage everyone to make one-on-one prep calls to hear opinions and reach an agreement. Then you can use your meetings to put a formal stamp on any consensus decision reached. Explain the process clearly (that is, use the “framing” tactic described in previous chapters) so that everyone understands the process explicitly. No matter what objective you choose for your own global team meetings (option A, B, or C), you can help everyone by being explicit about which method you are using.
A fourth strategy for encouraging debate among those who would otherwise shun confrontation is to adjust your language, avoiding upgraders and employing downgraders (see pages 65–67 in Chapter 2) when expressing disagreement. As you recall, an upgrader is a word that makes an opinion sound stronger, such as “absolutely,” “totally,” or “completely.” Such words are popular in confrontational cultures. By contrast, in confrontation-avoiding cultures, people are more likely to use downgraders such as “sort of,” “kind of,” “slightly,” or “partially.” An extreme example comes from a former Thai colleague, who would express her disagreement with me by using a quadruple downgrader: “Maybe we could think about this slightly differently . . . perhaps . . . what do you think?”
When expressing disagreement yourself, it is not difficult to change your words slightly based on the cultural context you are working in. Sean Green, an American living and managing a team in Mexico City, describes his experience:
After starting my assignment in Mexico, I attended several meetings during which I would disagree with a stance that
one of my peers or staff members had taken. And I would voice that disagreement by saying “I don’t agree with you.” But in Mexican culture this level of disagreement is not acceptable, and my open expression of disagreement would effectively end the debate with no further attempt to change my point of view.
I soon learned that, if I wanted to encourage team debate, it was important to use phrases like “I do not quite understand your point” and “Please explain more about why you think that.” These expressions encouraged give-and-take rather than shutting down the conversation completely.
On the other hand, if you are working with a culture that is more confrontational than your own, be very careful about choosing stronger words than are natural to you to express your disagreement unless you have a solid and nuanced grasp on exactly where the line is drawn between acceptable debate and inappropriate attack. I do not recommend that you begin an overseas meeting by telling your French client, “You are totally wrong,” or announcing to your German supplier, “I am in absolute disagreement with your proposal.” In these cultures, disagreement is expressed more directly than in some others, but that doesn’t mean anything goes. It’s easy to overshoot on the Disagreeing scale.
This happened to Wei Lin, a Stanford-educated accounting professor from China who became a colleague of mine at INSEAD. Lin was startled when students made classroom comments like “I don’t agree with that point,” which struck him as insolent and inappropriate. Add to this the fact that Lin was rather small and youthful, so that many of his Dutch, German, and Scandinavian MBA students towered over him, and Lin began to feel that the in-class disagreements amounted to a public attack on his authority.
Lin sought advice from several of his fellow professors. “They seemed to feel it was both appropriate and beneficial to have a debate with the students in the classroom,” Lin recalls. “So I decided I would be just as confrontational with them as they were with me.” Unfortunately, Wei Lin didn’t quite understand the subtle difference between healthy debate and full-on aggression in a European context. “I was really shocked when I got the participant evaluations at the end of the semester. The students described me as hostile and angry,” he says. “But I was just trying to adapt to their style.”
